This is weird, but...I was listening to something unfamiliar on my girlfriend's car's satellite radio the other day, and it turned out to be 0peth. I absolutely loved it. Far more "transcendent" than I expected based only on the stereotypes I was perpetuating (never actually heard them previously).

I'm thinking of doing a DLA blog post on this relevation. Is that a bad plan? I don't want to be too out of line.

The last comment was unnecessary, as it creates an all-purpose defense mechanism. All of a sudden any desire to cull side-tracking commentary becomes the censorship of pretentious moderators who feel that they are elite simply because they associate themselves with the word tradition, and you by definition, the censored, must be some sort of heroic martyr who by nature of being opposed to pretension is a humble god whom everyone should praise for your down-to-earthiness.

This board does not, and never has deleted posts for moral reasons or due to some moral agenda. Please get real.

This, I'm sure, is primarily about peak oil -- Ruppert was in the film The End of Suburbia, as well, which appears to have been more limited in the scope of its implications and less brazenly alarmist (based on this trailer, at least). Peak oil acolytes run the gamut from bunker-mentality survivalism to those who see a more gradualist repealing of the gains of the Industrial Revolution. Many are successful oil businessmen and just as many come from the academic left. Most believe, in some manner, that we are in population overshoot and that peak oil is the primary Malthusian limit we are facing over the long term.

These folks tend to shy away from Spenglerian arguments and stick to a narrative based on scientific or common-sense speculation. James Howard Kunstler may come the closest to marrying the peak-oil ideas with a critique of decadence -- the fault of "excess energy" that will soon be a luxury.

I suggest The Oil Drum for the harder-nosed science of it, and exploring the links in their sideboard for various related perspectives.

Yeah, well, about that -- I am almost certain that the 'Von Music Group' is involved. What this group exactly *is* and how it pertains to Von itself I do not know for sure, but I have a distinct feeling I wouldn't want to touch anything they represent with a ten foot pole.

It's a bit difficult to explain. See for yourself and you be the judge:

Coincidentally, my first thought after starting my second viewing of Until the Light Takes Us two weeks back was that I would like to know my dad's reaction to the music and ideas after all these years. I'm going to sit him down to watch the DVD release.

Should a band's inferior releases influence our judgment of their good ones? Poor releases, just as much as good ones, give us insight into the band and their career as a whole and shed light on their other works.

You're begging the question.

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After all, Darkthrone in 2010 has the same members as Darkthrone 1990

Not true.

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If their later releases show poor songwriting then it's absurd to attribute a flash of brilliance to their earlier music

You have to demonstrate why it is absurd, not just state it. If there was a flash of brilliance -- an artifact of the Zeitgeist and the music itself -- then there was a flash of brilliance. Working in reverse temporal order to render these judgments makes no sense. Ditto the incoherent apple analogy.

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I just don't think it's right to say 'I like Darkthrone, but only their early stuff.' Each album shows me a different facet of Darkthrone and over 10 years of releasing crap shows me I don't actually like Darkthrone that much.

No, you just don't like the works in question that much. You have yet to make the connection from that to rejecting other individual works.

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The album/band distinction just seems totally nonsensical to me, we should stop severing parts of discographies and accept a band/composer entirely without reservation.

"Accept" it in what sense? I think most everybody here accepts that later DARKTHRONE is just as bad as the early stuff is brilliant. Why don't we instead say that all DARKTHRONE is brilliant? Or that "DARKTHRONE" is brilliant (which is what is being said; see below)?

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There was no such absurdity in the classical era - a composer was the sum of his works.

Yes, they are the sum of their works, as in their complete corpus is required in some sense to place them among other practitioners in their tradition. Same case here, with all the same "absurdity."